


a reality out of reach

by Riyazura



Category: Oxenfree (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26431147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riyazura/pseuds/Riyazura
Summary: An Oxenfree one-shot. Jonas feels a break in a sacred place, and a string in his heart is twinged until it snaps. A light shines blood-red in the murky blackness of the bunker, and despite Alex's warnings, a regretful decision is made. Takes place just before the room containing Oxenfree's final climax.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	a reality out of reach

A feeling of familiarity, nagging at the darkest, farthest corners of his mind with nostalgia-laced fangs. A song he once knew, one warped in such a way that it is not how he swears it has always been.

This song should imbue merely the melody of a ukulele, and yet, Jonas can detect something else. An undertone, perhaps—or a murmur. It seems more like a murmur to him; this sound, though it is quiet, is entirely graceful, _perfect._ Jonas can imagine that this singer worked tirelessly to get their voice to be so beautiful. He knows so, actually.

That is because he knows the woman who is singing. It is his mother.

His mother who passed away to cancer.

That knowledge is what echoes in Jonas' ears when the song stops abruptly, and as the tape player's white light falls away to darkness.

He feels a break in a sacred place, a string being twinged in his heart until it snaps, and a regretful sigh escapes his lips before he has the fortitude to stop it.

That song is a reminder of his failures, and yet again it twists the rationalities of his mind, spurring him to speak out.

"Alex," he calls out quietly as she shines her flashlight upon the tape player, "it's so weird that that song keeps playing. It has to be playing for a reason, right?"

His step-sister's voice chastises him in a way he can predict that shouldn't sound so familiar and expected already. "Jonas, please." She clung to the hem of his sage-green sleeve in an attempt to make him snap out of his longing that had been luring him in over the course of this arduous night. "Let's move on! That's not who you think it is. We've come so far already; we're almost off this God-forsaken island, and if this is just those ghosts playing tricks on us, trying to lure us into their nostalgia traps, then—"

 _"'Nostalgia traps?'_ But Alex!" He turns to scrutinize her pleadingly, though he sounds angry. "Just give me this one chance! What if it _is_ my mom? What if she really is in there, singing to me?"

"You already got a chance in the cabin, and you were proven wrong. Would it be worth learning if it wasn't her all over again? Would it be worth _risking?"_

"Yes, it would be," Jonas growls with the edge of his typical stubbornness as he pulls himself away from her. "It would be if I get to talk to my mom one last time. Now fix the tape player already."

Alex lingers behind him for just a moment too long before she steps up to the player. She glowers as she passes him, offering a bitter "you're welcome" before she fits her fingers delicately into its wheel's grooves. She spins it smoothly like a ball, a circle, a loop. It rotates, round and round, until at last the orb of light that was previously above it illuminates the bunker once more.

Except now, the light is no longer white; it is red. Red, the color of blood, the color of the ghosts' power dominating over their futures, taunting them with nearly intangible glimpses of the darkest moments of their pasts.

Jonas stares upon that blood-red light in the murky blackness of the bunker, splayed hands feeling his way towards it with uncertainty. Red lines manifest themselves through near-inaudible hisses of something otherworldly; the tape player plays by itself his mother's song.

Surely this isn't the Sunken, though. It _had_ been earlier in the night, in the cabin in Edwards Woods, but, _oh,_ he couldn't take it this time if it wasn't who he swears is singing...

"Is... Is that?" _Is that really you, Mom?_

Alex can sense something he doesn't, or maybe he refuses to acknowledge—something more than the red lines manifesting themselves through the hisses of the otherworldly.

"Jonas," she murmurs behind him, but as she can further distinguish the wavering of reality, static making her hair stand on end, a surge of adrenaline rushes through her blood and she shouts in horror, _"Jonas!"_

A portal is opening right before them, just as it had when they opened the first one, and just as it had when they saved Ren from his.

All that happened after that occurred in the length of a heartbeat. Reality warped and folded into itself, and the next thing Alex was aware of was Jonas levitating high above her.

"No!" she shrieks, a hand over her mouth as she watches in abject horror at his form, silhouetted and struggling against the shadows' pull, his wide and frightened eyes glowing blood red.

_If his eyes are red like he said mine were, then does that mean—_

_No. No time for thinking. Jonas needs to be freed right now,_ Alex reasons to herself, panickedly wiping a wisp of blue hair from her dampened brow. She lifts her radio up into her fingers, as shaky and unsure as they are.

Alex barely dares to breathe as she fine-tunes the radio's knob illuminated red by the portal, keen on detecting the faintest frequencies that somehow connect to the otherworldly. Her comprehension of the world tears a little more, the Sunkens' defeaning whispers screaming a little higher, as she connects the dots of Jonas' portal one by one.

At last, it forms a triangle. Alex can feel the supernatural's strength receding, and Jonas finally levitates slightly lower—low enough. Alex notices when he fights against their grasp, reaching out even if only a little, his fingers curled into claws. That is enough for her, and she leaps up with unprecedented determination.

She howls over the ear-splitting hum of the rift's energy, refusing to let its blinding bloody light blind her—

"Damn you _all_ to hell—you give me back my brother _or else!"_

Their hands clasp together, squeezing one another's for dear life. Then gravity pulls upon Alex once more, and she brings Jonas back down with her.

They crash to the ground in the wake of the portal's powerful exit. All is dark once more.

As she lies motionless, Alex faintly hears the clatter of a concrete pebble striking the ground.

She blinks open her eyes. The bunker is pitch-black again. She pushes herself up to her elbows.

"Jonas?" she whispers in the deathly quiet. It echoes off the concrete walls; a foreign sound she otherwise wouldn't have noticed without the portal having been there a moment earlier.

"Jonas?" She tries again, her voice lighter with dread. "Jonas, p—please tell me you're okay."

Her only response is a hoarse cough.

Her breath hitches in her throat. She scrambles for the flashlight illumining a small portion of the room—she didn't realize until now she must've dropped it in the panic of the rift opening. Her heart races as she shines it upon him; _Please be okay please be okay please be_ —

Jonas is huddled across from her, sprawled out on the floor from where she must have pulled him down.

A panicked exclamation of fear pours involuntarily from her lips, and she scrambles over to him. "Jonas! Jonas, wake up!"

He protests feebly against her hands shaking him, groaning at first before he gathers the strength to move. His hands clap against the gritty floor as he lifts himself to his knees, still hunched over and gasping for breath.

Alex hesitates next to him; she wants to ask him if he's alright, if he needs a hand, or if he wants to simply catch his breath and think for a moment. But what just happened weighs too heavily on her mind, and she can't help but ask:

"You... You're okay, after all of that?"

Jonas turns his head dazedly towards her, eyes half-closed. His breaths are the sole sound that fill the bunker.

Then he turns his gaze back to in front of him, more sullen than before. "Yeah," he sighs.

It makes Alex cringe to think that his voice is so weak all of a sudden. All because of the Sunken...

"Your eyes."

Jonas can't help but give her a quizzical look.

"Your eyes," Alex clarifies quieter this time with sagging shoulders. Her hand is clasped tightly around the sleeve of her jacket when she rises to back away. "They were red."

Jonas' sharp gaze falls. "You said you saw Micheal after I told you that yours were red. Right?" _Is that where this is going?_ it seemed he is indirectly asking her.

Alex nods before realizing he isn't watching her, and then she affirms, "Yeah. Th—That's what happened for me." A pause of hesitance. Then, "Did that happen for you?"

Jonas' brow furrows. "Why is that your business?"

Alex's features twist in defeat. The beam of her flashlight scours the floor. "It's not, fine," she huffs.

"I don't know why I even bothered trying." Jonas scoots himself into a sitting position to rest his arms on his knees, hiding his face between them. "I should've guessed. _Of course_ it wasn't her in the tape player."

Alex sighs before garnering the courage to request, "Would you be alright with telling me what you saw?"

The boy across from her doesn't move at first, but he ultimately lets up a little.

"I was in a forest," he begins in the silence of the bunker, "hiking with my mom.

"It felt like we'd been there for at least a day already—like I was transported back in time with no memory of now. It wasn't like I was thrown into that memory like—like I'm assuming you felt when you saw Micheal." Alex nods in affirmation.

"This time it felt different. It felt _peaceful._ Not like I knew how the story would end, even though, well—at the time, I knew it _could_ end that way. But it was early into her diagnosis. That felt too far along into the horizon back then."

Alex's fingers fold neatly together. Jonas is referencing his mother's illness.

"She was talking to me about wildlife and plantlife, showing me the undersides of different kinds of rocks to reveal insects, or how to identify different trees through their trunks or leaves... I was as engrossed in her explanations as she was explaining them to me," he chuckles, "so that's how I know this trip was our last one. I wouldn't have bothered to listen otherwise." He rubs the backside of his neck as a soft smile plays at his lips. "There's one thing I learned the most about from my mom that single time I listened, and that was how complex nature is."

"She was teaching me something that, looking back, is more important than I ever thought it would be. In fact, I forgot it happened at all until... until I was shown that memory over again." The boy's hazel gaze grows distant. "I wonder why it happened the way it did."

"Maybe it was to remind you of that thing," Alex pipes up. "What did she tell you?"

"She was telling me about what it means for nature to continue as we do. Life is so much more complicated than we want to think. Nature exists and changes even as we live our own separate modern lives, and that's something my mom admired about it. Our lives are so stiff, but every time there was something new to discover in that forest reserve in Missouri we would always visit."

His silhouette is extraordinarily dispirited, and even though Alex hadn't known him for long, she hadn't expected to see such a mournful display on him ever.

"I almost feel like... it could've been my fault that she died in the first place."

The girl across from him admonishes in horror; "Jonas..."

"I never did anything to help _myself_ when she was sick—not my rock-bottom grades, not my lowest rung on the high school social ladder, not how I treated my peers for her sake—I was always too weak to admit that I was so awful!"

Jonas takes a deep breath before he leans back on his hands, stretching out his legs as he reclines his head. "I've been to _juvie._ I was a bad kid, Alex. Did you expect any better of me?" he jokes crudely. "I cared about my mom, but I didn't care enough to help her when she needed it most. And look where that's gotten me." His face twists before he turns his gaze away. "I'm making deals with demons just to get a chance to say that I'm sorry."

Alex sits lazily in front of him, staring at her loosely clasped hands outlined by the flashlight resting on the concrete floor beside her. "I know the feeling. I won't go into detail, as that won't help anyone, but—I know the feeling."

She lends him a moment of silence before continuing. "We all have _someone,_ right?" She asks.

Jonas glances up to quirk an eyebrow at her. "I mean... We should, at least," she clarifies. "Someone to talk to when we need it most. Someone who understands the other. For you, that was your mom, huh?"

"You're not wrong about that. I haven't talked to my dad half as much as my mom, even after she was gone."

"Yeah... I only ever talked honestly about things that really mattered to my brother. I could never trust the others, not even Ren—even though, erm, he's Ren."

"Heh," a genuine laugh lifts Jonas' features, "you could say that again."

"Come on," Alex gently urges. Threading her fingers into his own, she coaxes him to leave the now-dark tape player behind and follow her.

When instead she was met with a blank stare, she tries to fill the disconcertment hanging low in the air with a mild chuckle. "This isn't awkward, you know. We're step-siblings now. Albeit— _'step-'_ —but seeing as we are currently fighting against the most _terrifying_ night of our lives, now is as good a time as any to just call each other siblings... the _'someone'_ we both need right now."

To Jonas, those last words she speaks seems like a sigh. Perhaps the taste of bitter lament is still fresh on her tongue too.

Then he thinks deeper. "Wait. Did you... did you call me your 'brother' when you pulled me back?"

"I did," she confirms in the most hushed whisper.

Her chocolate eyes are alight in emotion and her brows pinched together in worry. _Concern._ She cared for what he had lost.

Probably—no, _definitely—_ because she knew just how painful it was to endure while everyone else was in denial and ignorance of her losses. From what Jonas had seen of her friends before the rift had been opened, he could easily guess that was the case. They were great matches as step-siblings, then. They both knew what it felt like to endure hardships and judgement alone in the face of ignorance.

She began again: "Am I—Am I _wrong,_ Jonas?"

His head is ducked as he admits in a flat, gritty voice; "No."

"I'm glad." The thick fabric of his new step-sister's red jacket hisses as she lifts her arms, wrapping them around him.

Jonas thought for a brief moment that hadn't felt such warmth from anyone but his mother when she was still alive. The knowledge gave his heart a faint flare of solace.

"Let's go whoop those demons' asses right back into the portal they came from, together. Sound good?" Her voice is close to his ear, softly cadanced and comforting.

All Jonas offers is a nod. At least her words bring the faintest ghost of a smile upon his lips.

There was no name-calling for whose fault it was that wounds, both old and new, were being opened along with the portal. It was just lighthearted siblingly jokes stirring them into action, to mend the wounds they knew they had caused in tandem.

**Author's Note:**

> "Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life."
> 
> —Truman Capote, "The Grass Harp"
> 
> I feel almost as though this isn't exactly canon-compliant—I don't know why—but that may be because I focused on telling a story between Alex and Jonas that was more heartfelt than anything else, and because I made Jonas stay beside Alex after he would have been stolen by the Sunken in-game, leaving Alex alone during the climax. I realized that's something the game never explored, which was the resolution of each of these characters' grief. They all experience it and it leaves scars on them, but if there's anything this game does, it's make those scars run deeper. They would have been better off without the game even happening and causing them to get stuck in the loop... which is depressing. So I decided I'd try my hand at fixing that.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading it nonetheless—I quite enjoyed writing it!


End file.
